Downtown Flushing traffic plan revised

From the Times Ledger:

Business owners on 40th Road in Flushing got their way Monday when the city Department of Transportation announced it will not be reversing traffic and rerouting buses to the narrow downtown street as part of its new traffic mitigation plan.

The plan, which the DOT’s Queens Borough Commissioner Maura McCarthy announced last week will be implemented at the beginning of July, is aimed at comprehensively addressing the downtown area’s traffic woes.

Originally slated to make traffic on Main Street one-way in addition to other changes, the blueprint is now being billed as a “modified two-way” plan in which turns will be restricted or barred entirely onto and from some of the most heavily trafficked streets.

One change in the proposal will make it illegal for buses to turn from Main Street onto Roosevelt Avenue. In the plan revealed this past February, traffic would have been reversed on 40th Road, allowing buses to use the short stretch as a detour.

But the street’s many merchants howled at the plan, saying the estimated 40 buses an hour the proposal would bring to the block at peak times would cripple their businesses by blocking on-street parking, creating unsafe situations for drivers as well as pedestrians and causing intense traffic jams.